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Wireless Networking Hardware

Linksys Ships Dual-band, Tri-standard A+G Wireless 81

Posted by CowboyNeal from the all-skate-everyone-skate dept.
Anonymous Howard writes "Designtechnica has a news article about LinkSys shipping to market their new line of wireless dual-band, tri-standard A+G products. They support 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g simultaneously with speeds of up to 54mbps. I could actually bring my laptop home and not have to switch my wireless card and settings! It comes at a pretty hefty price though, $299 for router and $279 for access point. I think my fingers could handle the exercise a bit longer until prices come down. Who here is willing to fork out that much for tri-band gear?" This is exactly what I've been looking for since I got an 802.11g wireless card. All of the 802.11g access points I've seen couldn't operate in 802.11g mode so long as older cards were in the area. Finally, I can upgrade my systems over time.
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Linksys Ships Dual-band, Tri-standard A+G Wireless More

Linksys Ships Dual-band, Tri-standard A+G Wireless

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  • drivers. Drivers like the ones that Intersil seems to have for their Linux WLAN APs, but won't give any information to Linux wlan driver authors.

  • Simultaneous b&g (Score:4, Informative)

    by djrogers ( 153854 ) on Saturday April 19, 2003 @09:42AM (#5764352)

    All of the 802.11g access points I've seen couldn't operate in 802.11g mode so long as older cards were in the area.


    Yeah, and unfortunately this AP doesn't change that. That's the way the standard was written, and nowhere does Linksys claim to be able to perform such magic...

    • But what if you configure the b & g with two different channels and two different ssids? You can create a seperate infrastructure for each type of network and in that case you should be able to use both at full speed.

      • Re:Simultaneous b&g (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        *thwap* no, the G is the B chipset. You can either use it in G mode or B mode, but the chipset doesn't magically split into two radios and do both at once. You set one channel, one ssid, and one radio for this. Hell, the entire a/b/g thing can probably only do 1 protocol method at a time if it uses 1 chipset for everything. If you get an a/b/g combo card, you can't talk to 3 networks at once. You can talk to 1, you can pick a b or g, but not all three or both at the same time. This product coming from Links

    • Airport Extreme does it. (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I hate apples. Macs suck, apples suck, they're overpriced and slow.

      However all that said, their airport basestation still gives 802.11g laptops their full speed at the same time as 802.11b laptops work at their speed. The standard might not be written to support it, but the Airport Extreme in my dorm works fine simultaneously across TiBooks with G and thinkpads with B.

  • Apple AirPort (Score:3, Informative)

    by Johnny Mnemonic ( 176043 ) <mdinsmore.gmail@com> on Saturday April 19, 2003 @09:44AM (#5764360) Homepage Journal

    The Apple AirPort [apple.com] Base Station can be set to operate exclusively in g speeds--it will ignore b clients. I dunno if this is a common or standard feature of g access points, but there you go.

    OTOH, if you're looking for something that does both b and full-speed g at the same time, is that even technically possible? And no, I didn't RTFA. However, for instance the Apple base staion again--if it does both b and g, the g speed doesn't crash all the way back to b, but is rather diminished by about 1/2 of it's typical speed. YMMV depending on range and b/g client ratio, and what the different clients are accessing.
    • According to the Linksys user manual on the 54G wireless router, you can select mixed for B & G, or G only. From what I am reading, I would guess that the box has two receivers and one transmitter. Switching the Tx as needed for sending out to which ever needs it in mixed mode.
  • All those coffee shops and bookstores that want to offer wireless access to anyone can now rejoice.
  • ...I'm still waiting for OS Drivers for my Ti ACX100 based Wifi Card.

  • Would be if you wanted to offer flexible wireless access in your business--say a coffee shop or something with a small number of users. You could support everybody, Apple, PC, whatever, and not have to worry about people bitching that their card "just doesn't work here."

    Now show me a heavy-duty pro version of the tri-band wifi router and I'll be super interested.

  • Linux support... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Munra ( 580414 ) <slashdot@jonat[ ... k ['han' in gap]> on Saturday April 19, 2003 @10:21AM (#5764386) Homepage
    Before anyone else says it, there are Linux drivers available, although they are in their early stages.

    The wlan-ng [neohapsis.com] project has early stage support for the wusb12 card.
    More details available @ the Linux-USB device [www.qbik.ch] site.

    Luckily they don't use the hideous Broadcom chipset, which still [petitiononline.com] does not have Linux support, even though it's sold in Dell, Linksys, Belkin and Apple (new Powerbooks, anyone?) wireless products, to name but a few. *grr*

    • Actually, I was talking about drivers for 805.11g or 805.11a, especially for Cardbus cards. The wusb12 is only 805.11b and usb, which is not very desirable for a notebook or subnotebook.
      The majority of 805.11g cards use the arm based intersil chipset and they don't give out any information about it. On the other hand intersil offers OEMs an 805.11b/g AP reference platform on a Linux basis.
    • Don't worry. Once there are Linux drivers for this card Linksys will change the main ship on the card and make the drivers not work. This ia a tradition with Linksys.
      • Don't forget D-Link. DWL-650 and DWL-650+ are completely different chips as well.
      • ...which is why linksys is so inexpensive. If you need LAN equipment that is guaranteed to stay constant over a long period, buy high-end 3COM.

        (actually, all the different linksys 100baseT cards I've tried have used the tulip driver anyhow, despite frequent chipset changes.)
    • Both the WPC55AG and WMP55AG adapters are based on Broadcom's chips. As well, both the WPC54G and WMP54G also use Broadcom's chips. There are no public linux drivers for this chip as of yet. From what I've read, the WRT and WAP products also use the Broadcom chips, but since they require no client drivers, it is a non-issue. What I find interesting is that these access points run embedded linux, which means that there is linux code out there for talking to these chips.

      If you don't believe me about the
      • That's right. We are looking for 802.11g support in Linux for our products. And we will go with the first hardware manufacturer who ships those drivers.

        I hope somebody from their side is reading this, because its a PITA for customers to not get what they want.

  • B-Card Holders; (the new smokers) (Score:5, Funny)

    by LibertineR ( 591918 ) on Saturday April 19, 2003 @10:30AM (#5764396)
    I can see it now.

    You are in your favorite coffee house, zipping along at G-speed, when some loser B-Card holder opens up that ancient Apple boat-anchor, and slams the whole building down to B-Speed.

    We are looking at the new "smoker" to be admonished, segregated and finally kicked to the curb for daring to fuck with our precious bandwidth, the way that smokers fucked with our oxygen.

    Soon, you will see them outside on the street, shivering in the cold, huddled together over warm repeater, taking digital drags of packets, polluting the internet environment with their dropped bits, and NAT requests.

    Scorn them, outlaw them, as they fuck it up for the rest of us. Let them connect in their poor neighborhoods, where you can still see the bitches walking the streets crying "Hey Daddy, I'll suck your dick for an IP address. Hook a bitch up!"

    Losers.

    • Its a shame none of you have done your homework. Ill probably come off sounding like an Apple Fanboy, but I am far from it. The Apple Airport Extreme 802.11g Base stations handle both B and G, AT THE SAME TIME. The base station dosent ignore one card, while providing to the other, nor does it throttle down speeds to the G cards when the B cards are around. It throttles down speed for the B cards only. Between me, my roomate, and best friends, we have an iBook, with a B card in it, a G4 Powerbook with a

      • Re:B-Card Holders; (the new smokers) (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I'd suggest you take a look at the specs again. I and quite a few others know by experience the problems with 802.11b units in 802.11g airspace.

        Betting your ibook with 802.11b is actually logging into another wireless network somewhere close by. No other 802.11g station has been able to pull this one off, care to explain how apple achieve a 'miracle'?

        • I would assume they would do it by using two different channels for broadcasting B and G. If I remember properly, it's possible to run 3 different 802.11b networks in a given area without overlapping frequencies. I'm not sure how G works, though. It would make them more expensive, and you'd probably never get full G speeds when a B device was present, but it'd still be faster than B alone.
          • I have Dlink G stuff.

            Sharing B/G;
            think it goes something like this ...

            b & g get equal air time
            b does its thing as fast as is capable for say one second
            then its G's turn to do its thing as fast as it can for its one second.

            G needs all the seconds it can grab to do 54mb w/o waiting on B to do its thing so 'G now is sort of a 1/2 speed, 27mb max when mixed mode sharing the AP.

            This also is why G is only doing 20mb prox real world thrru-put versus 30mb on :A:
            stand alone: it still has a wait state to at l

      • Re:B-Card Holders; (the new smokers) (Score:5, Informative)

        by 1g$man ( 221286 ) on Saturday April 19, 2003 @10:58AM (#5764490)
        Do your own homework: straight from apple [apple.com].

        In the fine print at the bottom (footnote 3):
        "To achieve maximum speed of 54 Mbps the wireless network may only have AirPort Extreme-enabled computers on it."
      • B and G use the same channels. It is quite impossible to run both at full speed.

        Systems that do both simultaneously split the channels.

    • Re:B-Card Holders; (the new smokers) (Score:4, Informative)

      by pauljlucas ( 529435 ) on Saturday April 19, 2003 @11:41AM (#5764644) Homepage Journal
      You are in your favorite coffee house, zipping along at G-speed, when some loser B-Card holder opens up that ancient Apple boat-anchor, and slams the whole building down to B-Speed.
      Considering that the DSL link to the coffee house is only probably at most 1.5Mbps, being forced to throttle down to 11MBps on the LAN is irrelevant.
    • Even if your coffeehouse has a T-1 in it, 802.11b is still going to be faster than the wired connection to the Net. Bottom line is that no one will notice that you dropped to b-speed unless you've got one laptop serving FTP to another. Yeah, happens all the time, I know.
  • I could actually bring my laptop home and not have to switch my wireless card and settings!

    How many of you have a wireless network where you work? I dont..but most IBM consultants i meet carry laptops with wireless cards. Can i use a wireless network card with a wired network? That would be more useful, wouldn't it?

    • Well you can... (Score:2, Informative)

      by emotionus ( 657937 )
      Get everyone who has a wifi card to chip in for a Access Point of your choice.Then plug the ethernet cable from your buisness into the Access Point. Bam, you have bridged your wired network to wifi.

      You may want to ask your place of buisness, if they find out they could get mad. Going wifi *could* open you to some secruity issues. I'd suggest doing some research on wifi secruity.
    • I personally would like to see a PCMCIA card with the wireless antenna and a wired plug.
  • I have the Linksys dualband .a/.b access point. It is junk. After being on for about two days it drops the speed down to about 15KB/sec, or it just stops working at all. They have NEVER released a single firmware update for this AP since it was released.

    Stay away from Linksys. I've since switched to D-Link and even put D-Link firmware on my Linksys WAP11s and they work so much better. I'm not constantly resetting them like I was before.

    The Linksys NIC drivers are also bad. They promote Turbo mode on
    • My experience is opposite. I've had D-Link switches slowly fail on me (starting at 100 mbps and working their way down to nothing over several days)...Everyone I talk to says stay away from D-Link.

      • Re:RUN AWAY! (Score:3, Funny)

        by NetJunkie ( 56134 )
        Heh... Sounds like hard drives. NO! DON'T BUY WESTERN DIGITAL! What? WD is great. Maxtor sucks, man! etc.
        • errrr....sorry man....I can't agree here.

          Both WD and Maxtor have their issues....(hell...I've had more Whore Digital drives fail than Max-whore drives....and both have been out sucked by IBM's Deathstars). But the good thing is....due to their "suckability," both companies now have better RMA policies. (gotta love the advanced RMA stuff).

          Speaking of RMA'ing, I rma'ed that pos WAP11 several times, and they were all defective. (one can say that it's because it was a linksys that it's defective.)

          Anyways..

  • I hope they handle this better than Netgear (Score:5, Informative)

    by enos ( 627034 ) on Saturday April 19, 2003 @10:58AM (#5764488)
    I used to have a Netgear WAB501 card. It got high praise from reviewers, so I figured why not. When I got the thing and started to look for Linux drivers, I noticed nobody gave a fuck about 802.11a chipsets, much less dual bands. There was one project that was in the early stages of a driver for a chipset whose number was close to mine, but it was already abandoned. So off it went back to buy.com.

    Now I got me a Netgear MA401. Less than half the price, works every time, and it has a common chipset. It may be 'only' 11 mbps, but that's better than 0 mbps.
  • If so, I'd think that incrementally adding new NICs as standards improve would be marginally more expensive (assuming you pay $100 for each wireless NIC at the time of release it would be $50-$75 more than buying one of these APs) and consume several PCI slots, but in a linux-based AP (which will run you another $150 or so on top of the rest of this shit, given that you could netboot it if you wanted) you will likely have four or five of them on even a cheap board. Something crappy with onboard video would
  • Still waiting for a good .a or .g PCMCIA card for the Ti-Book. Anybody know of one?
    • A few weeks ago, CompUSA was selling the Linksys 802.11g card that works in the TiBook for $60. I'm using it right now, along with the driver [kfu.com] hack here [osxhax.com] and I like it not only for the 802.11g but for the fact that it increases signal strength relative to the internal TiBook airport card by about a factor of 2 or 3. It uses the same BroadCom chipset that Apple calls "Airport Extreme" and Buffalo and D-Link [pcmag.com] also make cards which use this chip as well.
    • Cisco's AIR-CB20A (.11a card) has OS X driver support, and has been working pretty well for me.

  • Dell's offering... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by craenor ( 623901 ) on Saturday April 19, 2003 @12:08PM (#5764736) Homepage
    Dell now offers a mini-pci card in their newest D series laptops that is a wireless a/b/g card...I realize that isn't router, but it's the only a/b/g card I've seen.

    Having that kind of diversity in a card for your portable makes more sense to me then having that kind of diversity in your router.

    Craenor

  • Using B and G in the same area (Score:4, Informative)

    by notarus ( 216298 ) on Saturday April 19, 2003 @12:31PM (#5764813)
    This access point isn't going to help you use both B and G on it's own..

    Unfortunately, it is part of the standard that a G class access point will drop down to B if it sees any B style encoding.

    You can work arround this by setting the configuration of (most) APs to completely IGNORE B, but that's not very friendly.

    One solution, and the solution I recommend in the case where you REALLY want to have G out there, is to configure a "B" base station on one channel (1), and a G base station on another (6). Configure the G channel with a different SSID and hard-configure it not to drop down.

    You now have a G only system available, and older B users are still capable of associating.

    I would also point out that you must also hard code your adapter to run in only G-- it also will follow the standard and drop down.

    Frankly, in my personal opinion, you're better off buying a combo A/B access point and also a combo A/B card. Both are significantly cheaper, and the A standard is also significantly FASTER in real-world performance (to the tune of 2-5x better REAL throughput compared to G.)

    Good luck!

  • tri-band? (Score:3, Funny)

    by spazoid12 ( 525450 ) on Saturday April 19, 2003 @12:45PM (#5764850)
    Who here is willing to fork out that much for tri-band gear?

    Maybe, you should ask that question in some other article...one that discusses tri-band gear instead of dual-band.
  • So wait..does this mean if I have a A+G card in my laptop that I could get 100mbit wireless by maxing out both connections?

    It would be awesome if Linksys could rig it so that their cards could saturate both spectrums simultaneously as though it was one single connection.
    • Unfortunately, no.

      On the theoretical side: Maximum real-world throughput for G is about 12-18Mb/s or so. Maximum real-world throughput for A is about 26-30Mb/s or so, depending on what you're pushing. So your peak potential throughput would be something like 48Mb/s.

      However, on a much more realistic plane, you're not going to be able to do this anyway-- there is only one chip that drives the radio, and the chip isn't designed for dual actiivation, let alone load balancing or anything "fun".
  • The linksys Wireless-G Access point or router which is very cheap, sub 150 bucks, can do both 802.11g and 802.11b at the same time, you don't need to shell out extra for the 802.11a feature, just a note to the editor.

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